I have a spare web cam lying around, and figured it would be a great addition to set it up so it can take regular photos of our lounge when we're away on holiday. I did a quick Google, and managed to get a rudimentary solution running in less than half an hour using CommandCam and Powershell.

The solution was pretty basic: I downloaded the exe and then created a Powrshell script that captures an image every 5 minutes. I added an extra command to my script which sends me an email every now and then to remind me that the capture is still running. Basic, but it works! Note that this just runs forever, I'm happy with it working that way and I just stop it when I want to, although this could be altered to be a scheduled task or windows service.

With my web cam, the resulting images are pretty small too - around 250-300KB each, so I went one step further and changed my target folder to a Dropbox folder, This means my images are automatically uploaded to the web too, so I can admire my empty lounge using my phone in a matter of seconds.....

Every now and then, even as an administrator on a machine, you hit a folder that you just cannot delete. The usual route is to take ownership of the folder and it's child files and folders, but once in a blue moon this doesn't work and you're stuck with a folder you can't delete. Assuming no locks on the files, I found today that issuing the following commands from an elevated-level command prompt worked where the GUI equivalents didn't: